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102

TIL that the average height of a Dutch man increased by almost 10 inches since 1856

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rREny TIL that C.S. Lewis nominated J.R.R. Tolkien for the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was rejected on the grounds that his writing "has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality."
x6M55 TIL that the rate at which new words are added to languages has slowed in the digital era, and it's partly because the advent of automatic spell-checkers has given words recognized by these tools a "reproductive fitness" advantage, while non-standard spellings decline.
OQA6 TIL that Martine Rothblatt made millions by inventing satellite radio. When her daughter was diagnosed w/ pulmonary hypertension, she earned a PhD in bioethics & formed a biotech company that licensed drugs to treat her daughter’s illness from other companies, making them much more widely available
awnNL TIL that Alcoholics Anonymous does not have any organizational hierarchy and has been referred to as a ‘Benign Anarchy’.
lnX5 TIL that in 2009, two pilots overshot their flight from San Diego to Minneapolis by 500 miles because they had “engaged in deep conversation”